UCL brain study reveals that agreement is rewarding

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL and Aarhus University in Denmark have found that the 'reward' area of the brain is activated when people agree with our opinions. The study, published today in the journal Current Biology , suggests that scientists may be able to predict how much people can be influenced by the opinions of others on the basis of the level of activity in the reward area. In a study involving 28 volunteers in the UK, Professor Chris Frith (UCL Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging) and colleagues examined the effect that having experts agree with a person's opinions has on activity in their ventral striatum, the area of the brain associated with receiving rewards. Expert opinions about a piece of music produced more activity in this brain area when the subject shared the opinion. Expert opinions could also alter the amount of ventral striatum reward activity that receiving the music could produce ? depending on how likely the person was to change his or her mind on the basis of those opinions. Before the task, each volunteer was asked to provide a list of 20 songs they liked, but didn?t currently own. They were asked to rate the songs on a scale of one to ten depending on how much they wanted the song (a score of ten indicating that they wanted the song very much).